Profile in Leadership: Lorna Smith, MBA '87

Bright Horizons

By Coeli Carr

In her five years leading Horizons National, a nonprofit serving low-income and
educationally disadvantaged students, CEO Lorna Smith has helped transform the
organization into one of the top summer-learning organizations in the U.S.

What if schools that typically shut down in the
summer stayed open to offer underserved, local
youth a chance to play educational catch-up?
Horizons National forms partnerships with schools
to do just that: Its six-week summer program blends
high quality academics with cultural enrichment and confidencebuilding
activities. The result? Students caught in the achievement
gap gain the tools and support they need to become successful and
confident college-bound students.

Lorna Smith joined the national nonprofit eight years ago,
became executive director three years later, and was named CEO
in 2010. Growing up during the turbulent civil rights activism of
the sixties, she became a staunch advocate of social justice. Not
surprisingly, Horizons’ mission to close what she describes as “a gap
of opportunity and resources” resonated strongly with her.

Creating a Unified Network

When Smith came on board, the only other employee was the
executive director. “With just the two of us, it was a like a startup
in many ways,” she says. “Our annual budget was a meager $250K,
so we had nowhere to go but up.” The duo’s goal was to add more
affiliate schools to the organization’s dozen sites. But Smith quickly
saw a more pressing need.

The 12 affiliates that were already part of Horizons’ network
behaved as separate entities, and had only minimal ties with both
the central office and their sister sites. Smith knew that to secure the
outside funding needed to expand, Horizons would have to identify
itself as a national organization. This meant all its affiliates had to
be part of a unified system and infrastructure.

“We knew, if we listened to our affiliates and understood their
needs and how they operated, we’d be able to enlist their energy
in developing Horizons’ core principles and building program
consensus,” she says. “We’ve worked very hard to find that sweet
spot — that balance between standardizing and encouraging local
innovation and ownership.”

Through meetings and visits, Smith heard what the affiliate-sites
needed and wanted: funding support; centralized resources, including
standardized procedures to assess student progress and evaluate
curriculum; opportunities for professional development; and quality
control for Horizons’ programs. Smith oversaw the creation of affiliate
agreements detailing the responsibilities of both affiliates and the
central office. “We really prepared ourselves for our growth,” says
Smith.

By 2008, summer learning had become a hot topic in educational
reform, and Smith felt the time was ripe for Horizons to double its
affiliates and promote the brand. Around this time, educational
nonprofits seeking funding were being required to provide rigorous
evidence of their successful outcomes. Fortuitously, three educational
research studies conducted by Yale University demonstrated
the beneficial impact of Horizons’ approach.

Quantifying Horizons’ successes is a discipline close to Smith’s
heart. At one of her earlier jobs after college — as circulation director
for a legal periodical — Smith realized she needed better tools to
determine which solicitation tactics elicited the most responses from
readers. “That’s when I knew I had to learn how to better collect
and analyze data,” she says. So she came to Johnson to get her MBA.

Funding Efficiency

Beyond data collection, Smith prides herself on spearheading the
innovative funding model that Horizons has developed. “Our
funders love that we leverage every dollar they give us two or three
times, so that it generates three to five times the value of the original
contribution,” says Smith. “We have a very efficient funding model.”

Affiliates reach out to local funders, while the Horizons central
office facilitates their access to donations from “the broadest possible
range of private philanthropy,” as Smith describes it. “The small
size of the new affiliates would prohibit their access to large national
funders, and the national office would similarly have no access to meaningful local philanthropy,” she says. “However, the Horizons’
model, which allows national funds to flow to new affiliates, connects
corporate and local philanthropy.”

Supporting Affiliates

Horizons facilitates communication among affiliates, providing free
monthly conference calls for the affiliates’ executive directors and
hosting two annual conferences for all affiliates. “This shared information
allows Horizons to become a clearing house of innovative
ideas and best practices,” says Smith. “One affiliate might describe a
particularly successful fundraiser and share this strategy with other
affiliates. Or a teacher might describe an effective approach with
students, prompting other affiliates to try it.”

Empowering the affiliates’ teams is also part of the plan, says
Jenny Leger, an early-childhood educator who served for seven years
as executive director of the Colorado Academy affiliate in Denver.
“When Lorna visited us, she was always so generous with her
praise of our teachers, who gave up their summers for this worthy
endeavor,” says Leger, now a consultant for Horizons. “Her words
empowered their spirits, and eighty percent of them returned to
teach in the program over subsequent summers.”

Seizing Opportunities

Historically, Horizons’ model for adding affiliates focused on building
long-term learning communities with independent and private
K-12 schools. The schools provide campus space — and often business
and maintenance services — free of charge. Now, Horizons’
affiliate roster includes five institutions of higher learning: two community
colleges, two small, private colleges, and one graduate school
of education. Smith believes they are a good fit. “Many institutions
of higher learning, especially community colleges, believe in the
‘cradle-to-career’ support of their communities,” says Smith, adding
that remedial education — one of Horizons’ hallmarks — is often a
key component in serving the local population.

“We’re taking a good, hard look at what we have to do in adjusting
our business plan and its goals,” she says. It’s all part of staying
nimble, a trait Smith has used to green-light affiliate-generated
ideas. For example, all Horizons’ summer programs began at the
first-grade level for youngsters who had completed kindergarten.

However, Meredith Laban, executive director at the Dedham
Country Day School affiliate outside Boston, wondered what would
happen if sites welcomed even younger children. Last fall, she
proposed a pilot, pre-kindergarten program at her site to begin this
summer. “Lorna is very supportive of innovation and she agreed to
provide the funds for us to launch the pilot,” says Laban. “She trusts
her executives and teachers to be successful.”

The fruits of Smith’s multi-faceted outreach are quantifiable.
“In any given year since Horizons’ existence, the most we had ever
increased our affiliates was by two,” she says. “This summer, we’re
adding six new ones; we had planned to add five. And, because we
had the resources in place — both financial and organizational
systems — we could absorb them all.”

These new sites bring the total number of Horizons affiliates
to 26; Smith expects to double that number by 2016. “We’re on a
steep growth trajectory,” says Smith, who’s well aware that wellexecuted
expansion may garner more interest and support. In 2011,
Horizons served 2,015 students in 10 states through 20 affiliate
programs; it employs 10 full-time employees, and stays lean by
contracting with consultants.

Jane Williams, chair of Horizons’ national board of directors,
points out that there can be challenges to heading a growing
organization. “We had to trust when we appointed Lorna to lead
Horizons, she would also be the ideal person to shepherd our
organization into tomorrow,” says Williams, who’s also the producer
and host of “Bloomberg EDU,” a radio program. “She not only has
that flexibility, but also the vision to see what’s around the corner.
How does a board of directors get so lucky?”

In many ways, Horizons offers the ideal platform for Smith’s
mix of market-research expertise, entrepreneurial skills, and social
principles.

“When I started working here, it felt like home and I remember
thinking, ‘This program has so much potential, like a seed waiting
to blossom,’” says Smith. Many would agree that Horizons, a 2010
recipient of the Excellence in Summer Learning award from the
National Summer Learning Association, the industry’s policy and
advocacy organization, has achieved full bloom.

Coeli Carr writes about business topics. Her articles have appeared in
The New York Times, Time, portfolio.com and many other publications.